The Spiritual Practice Of Self-Mummification Shutterstock
By Richard Milner/Jan. 22, 2021 10:02 am EDT
When you think of mummies you might envision those ACE bandage-wearing guys pulled from sarcophagi in Egypt you know: all pharaonic, shrunken and distributing curses or maybe Universal Picture s miserably failed Dark Universe launch circa 2017 s Tom Cruise-led
The Mummy. (Actually, we re betting you didn t even remember that movie until right now, although you might remember Brendan Fraser s identically named 1999 movie.) But what you
don t probably think of is desiccated Buddhist monks hardened into a permanent, multi-hundred-year-old seated lotus position.
This is exactly the case, though, with members of Shingon, an ascetic, nondoctrinal sect of Buddhism that arose during Japan s Heian period (794-1185 CE), built from the tethers between Japan s native Shinto animism and Buddhism as it was imported from mainland China. Shingon monks followed Shugen